Big Brother 9/8/10 - It's Like Losing One Of My Best Dogs.

We’re down to the last week of Big Brother for the season, so it’s time for the regular schedule to get all screwed up. In tonight’s episode, we see the Veto Competition, Veto Ceremony, and the next Eviction. All this action means Julie Chen is hosting this episode so she can interview the evicted houseguest right away.

We pick up the action after Sunday’s episode when HOH Hayden nominated Lane with Britney. Hayden realized that Lane might vote to save Britney and evict Enzo if given the chance, so he’s going to work his hardest to assure Lane doesn’t get that chance. Enzo is sitting around the backyard, hand tucked into his pants Al Bundy style, discussing how he also doesn’t trust Lane where Britney is concerned.

Britney fruitlessly pleads her case to Hayden, explaining how most of the jury can’t stand her, but Enzo is sitting pretty if he makes it to the final two. Sitting pretty maybe, but I still don’t want to shake his hand without dousing it in Purell first.

The Final Power of Veto Competition of the Summer – Lights, Camera, Veto

The contestants need to match up descriptions of events from this season which match up with pictures of the houseguests. The tricky part is that each poster has one houseguest on the top and another on the bottom, and you need to match up with clues both above and below the frame.

Britney and Hayden seemed to have great memories and strategy for this competition. Enzo was just throwing posters up there, hoping he gets lucky. Poor Lane gets comical “look at this monkey dance” music every time they show him trying to figure out one of the clues. Maybe he can use it as theme music when Lane leaves the house.

Enzo tries first, and have more posters wrong than right. Then Hayden tries, and has them all correct. Hayden wins the veto, and Britney quickly goes into survival / suck up mode and fawns over how quickly Hayden solved the puzzle. She is still hopeful that she can convince Hayden to use the veto to save her and get rid of Enzo.

We’re Going To Let You In On A Little Secret. Pssst, You’re Screwed.

Hayden talks to Enzo and Lane and tells them that he wants to out the Brigade Alliance to Britney to explain why he isn’t going to use his veto to save her. It’s a shrewd move for Hayden, as it takes Britney’s anger away from him and towards Lane. Enzo actually piles it on poor Lane and throws in that “we all had side alliances to protect us” implying that Lane’s friendship with Britney was all a strategic act. Harsh. And it didn’t seem accurate either, as Enzo certainly didn’t have a side alliance, and Hayden, while well liked, was not particularly close to anyone either.

Britney gets ticked, mostly at Lane, and storms off to bed without talking to anyone. Oh, the suspense, will Lane get a chance to plead for her forgiveness before she heads off to the jury house?

Flash forward to the Veto Ceremony, where Lane and Britney give great “I love you guys” speeches. It’s pretty clear that Lane got a chance to make peace with Britney, as she had only nice things to say about him and the rest of the Brigade in her farewell speech, and she reached out and grabbed his hand. Britney states that she is proud to have been a “Casualty of the Brigade” if she wasn’t able to be a member of it.

Enzo offers to let Britney’s fiancé Nick have one free punch. Yes, everyone is going all out to get jury votes at this point. Enzo needs to cast his vote in front of everyone, and Britney is evicted. She knows it is coming and takes it well, and walks off to meet with Julie Chen.

Britney tells Julie that she forgives Lane and that she thinks he was really pulling for her to make it to the end with him. She’s right on that count, but will Julie reveal that to her or leave her in the dark? We aren’t left wondering for long, as now we see the farewell messages, and it looks like Lane talked for about half an hour as they kept editing out stuff. Lane had a very long ramble about how he didn’t use her and wanted to take her to the end, so it looks like the producers wanted to cut Lane some slack.

George, George, George of the Jungle, Watch Out For That Wall.

Finally, we kick off the first of the three parts of the final HOH competition for the summer. Hayden, Enzo, and Lane all sit on rope swings, and they slide back and forth on wires like Tarzan, smacking into padded walls on each side of the track. Just to make it more fun, they turn on a “waterfall” in the middle of the course. They are smacking against one side wall at a rate of at least once a minute.

This is going to be a long night for these boys. I think this challenge favors Hayden, as neither Lane nor Enzo have shown any skill at endurance challenges so far. They’re lucky they’re not competing against Matt, as he was the endurance challenge champion of the Brigade.

Tune in tomorrow to see who wins this part of the HOH competition, Ragan’s reaction in the Veto house to finding out that Matt lied about his wife’s health, and probably at least part of another section of the HOH challenge. We’re getting down to the end, but does anyone still care now that we’re stuck with the three surviving members of the Brigade and the house is a boring love-fest? I know that folks in Minnesota (where I live) more tv sets will be tuned to the Vikings season opener against the Saint than anything else (including our tv, if Mr. LG has anything to do with it), so I’ll definitely be checking out Ashley’s recap.